


A Double Act

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: But still..., Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs, Gen, Homestuck stuff, I thought it might be fun, I wanted to do a little tribute?, I'm so sorry, I've been excited for more Alternian clowns ever since I learned Hiveswap was a possibility, SO, Subjugglators, The Vast Honk, Theories, Troll Call, guesses, we know so little about these characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 18:36:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12847095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Twin souls for twin gods, right?  Theirs was a double act.





	A Double Act

**Author's Note:**

> I don't have a good excuse for this. I just... Got excited, I guess. :P I hope you enjoy it, if you read! It's mostly me babbling about the Mirthful Messiahs and the Vast Honk in the context of new clown trolls. I reference stuff we know about the Mirthful Church from Homestuck, Barzum and Baizli's Troll Call thing... And sort of also a really interesting post Poinko who works on Hiveswap made saying Barzum and Baizli were "excited" to meet us, all ominously. Heh.  
> Have a wonderful day!!

Perhaps it was holy to have been hatched together.  Perhaps Barzum and Baizli Soleil wore masks all smiling and screaming to split their faces right down the middle, just like their Mirthful Messiahs in those sacred scrawlings along the sides of murdermirth carnival tents.  Clown gods, eternally capricious, born of one soul…  The gods would provide a paradise planet, and the gods would usher in the end of the world.  They were chucklevoodoos and rage, and they were brotherhood beneath Alternia’s sticky sugar-spun sky.

Clowns still chanted all those ancient gory hymn-raps from long, long before Trizza Tethis, or even Her Imperious Condescension, and so Barzum and Baizli had always known them.  It was their blood-right – it was their calling.  To be a Subjugglator was to bow before the inevitable death of the universe, and so the Soleil twins bowed together.  They wore the contradictions of their gods where everyone could see.  It was worship in every grin, in every nervous twitch.  Where Baizli smiled, their mask sobbed.  Where Barzum frowned, their mask was always laughing. 

Twin souls for twin gods, right?  Theirs was a double act.    

Theirs was spinning up above those lofty stadium seats gone sticky and scabbed over with almost every color of blood, dangling from ribbons, swinging on clattering windchimes of bone.  Dizzy and silent, meeting each other’s eyes with almost too much knowing.  And the world spun on beneath them, a frenzy and a prayer. 

As long as Baizli Soleil had been real, Barzum had been there inside their mind.  Shifting.  Stretching.  Slathering both their skins with worshipful paint. 

As long as Barzum Soleil had been real, Baizli had been there close enough to touch.  Staring.  Snickering.  Sealing masks over half their faces so they truly completed each other.

Maybe Barzum was nervous, and Baizli dragged them forward, silent to the rest of the world.  Maybe words got juggled back and forth between them, an echo chamber of the mind, until it honestly couldn’t have been said where a single thought began.

(Better yet – maybe it didn’t matter who thought what, sometimes.  Would it have meant anything to the Mirthful Messiahs, under all the shattering weight of the Vast Honk to come?  No, Barzum thought, and Baizli thought, and they spun that thought between them like playing cat’s cradle with some poor blasphemer’s intestines.)

The Honk would end reality, and Subjugglator teachings said it was on its way all the time.  It didn’t matter what the Heiress did with their living selves, maybe, because the world was a doomed thing already mourned and already forgiven.  Wait for the paradise planet, wait for the rivers of crackling soda and the sky all nauseous, seething rainbows.  Wait, and then –

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

The joke would be over as soon as it began.

That evening the Soleil twins woke up in an instant, going from a woozy, carbonated dream to their familiar echoed thoughts like switching on the TV.  Barzum wriggled out of the sopor slime first – their recuperacoon was crooked and split down the middle the same as they were.  They left padding smears of gelatinous slime across the floor as they went to get their paints.  Baizli laughed – a tumbling, halting sound that always came out especially loud when their hive was silent – at something Barzum said that no one else would have been able to hear. 

Perhaps it was a cruel joke, or perhaps it was kind.  There were so many clowns with bloodstained claws.  So many clowns with reasons to laugh that could have easily made them cry.  If they cried it would ruin their face paint, of course, or maybe work itself into part of the design. 

Barzum and Baizli’s shared lusus was out and away again, but that wasn’t a problem.  They’d never learned what it meant to be alone.  Some of the faithful were consigned to silence and stretching, heartless grey beaches; some clowns were shaken up inside like soda bottles ready to fizz and sputter and rage.  Not them, of course.  They were each other’s shadows, and people said their eyes were the kind of hollow that usually got left behind when a troll’s skull was scraped clean.

Dead eyes.  There were worse things on Alternia than having dead eyes.  Ask that clown on the empty grey beach, ready to be hatched in a sweep or so.  Ask him about it when  _his_  face cracks in two, holy and broken and terminal.  Ha-ha – the end is always coming.  Subjugglators tell the joke that is that death-row world.

Barzum and Baizli painted their makeup on very smooth, in orange and purple.  In the color of a killer sun, in the color of their blood.  Their hair was sticky and wild.  They would have to report to work with the Heiress, soon, maybe.  They might perch on either side of her throne, watching each other over her head as she snapped another selfie.  They might juggle murderous, matching clubs between them, ready to splatter brains out over the polished gold interior of a royal fuchsia ship. 

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps they truly did have a carnival act all their own, full of gibbering lights and sparkling stardust bone marrow smeared along the circus tent floors.  There were a lot of circuses on Alternia, though not as many as there had been before all the adult trolls were hurtled away to other worlds.  Now there were carnival ships, too, a flurry of a murder show tossed through space like so many bouncing rubber balls.    

No matter what, Barzum and Baizli would drape themselves in silks, and slip on the sort of pointed shoes that were so, so terrifyingly silent.  They could creep up behind someone the way a wind might, moving secret and deadly as thoughts.  Maybe they would meet a lowblood girl whose horns were on crooked, whose blood was warmer than impossibly warm.  Maybe they would meet a stowaway from a distant world that wasn’t supposed to exist yet.  It was more than possible, of course, though they didn’t know it.  Maybe they would have been excited, if they knew – it would be like a fresh take on an old, old game.

Alternia was a bleeding, hungry place, and Barzum and Baizli were a pair of its children.  Perhaps they were starving, too, whether for divinity or togetherness, whether for the slaughter their empire promised out among the stars or for a good joke that they’d pass back and forth even after a thousand sweeps had passed.  Purple bloods lived that long, after all, if Alternia didn’t rip them up first.  This was still the very beginning of what might be a long and gory act.  The curtains had only just come up. 

Barzum and Baizli would murmur to one another, lips so still they might have been carved just the same as their masks.  They would give themselves over to another night, sharing everything from blood to the soda bottle passed between them.  From the story still to come, all the way to the end of their world.           


End file.
